As promised, a little something about the larger agenda of the folks I call the "virginity movement" in the book. Because as much fun as it is discussing virginity as a concept, and as baffling as it is reading some of the comments about how it's just natural that women should be chaste (lest dudes don't want to marry them), there's a lot more to the purity myth than sex or no-sex. This myth is informing conservative policy and activism regarding women - and it ain't good. While, as Katha points out, it's not as overt as it was back in the day, the message is still the same and it's still affecting young women's lives. I would even argue that the fact that it's not as overt makes the myth that more dangerous - because we don't always see it...

(FYI: This is based on a speech I gave at Emory & Henry College)

There is a moral panic surrounding "girls gone wild," but the truth is tamer than the media would have us think. When I was writing The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, I noticed in a trend in the media and pop culture - they were talking about young women and sex. A lot.

In 2007 alone, nearly 1,000 news and magazine articles referred to the "girls gone wild" or "raunch culture" phenomenon. The topics of these articles ranged from general finger wagging about girls' supposed promiscuity and spring break, to op-eds about college women's slutty Halloween costumes. One article for Newsweek even wondered whether America was raising a generation of "prostitots." In another piece from The Washington Post, the reporter wrote young women hooking up was tantamount to "a mental health crisis on American campuses."

Now, the mainstream media has always talked about young women's sexuality, that's nothing new. But it wasn't just limited to the media. Also in 2007, five books were released - with titles like Prude and Unhooked - all arguing that pre-marital sex and hook up culture are terrible for young women. Not just terrible. Deadly.

One book, Unprotected, by Miriam Grossman, told readers that sexually active young women are more likely to be depressed and more likely to commit suicide. In Prude, the author writes that pre-marital sex "often condemns young women to a life of poverty and deprivation."

But the thing is, despite what these books and articles are saying - sexually active young women are in fact not diseased, depressed or suicidal. They are doing just fine. Shocking, I know.

The truth is, 95% of Americans have premarital sex, and this has been true for decades. Even for women who were born in the 1940s, nine out of ten had sex before marriage. Teenagers are using contraception more often than in past years, and more effectively. (Unless they've taken abstinence only education classes, of course, in which case they don't use contraception and have increased rates of oral and anal sex.)

Women are also attending college at the highest rates in history, and we're the majority of undergraduate and master's students. In addition, a national survey of five hundred thousand high school seniors from 1975 to 2005 showed that 70 percent of young women today report being happy with themselves, and that 77 percent are happy with their lives. The same study showed that 70 percent of young women think it's important to make a contribution to society, and that 90 percent hope to have a job that enables them to help others.

These statistics, showing happy and socially engaged young women, paint quite a different picture than conservative organizations and the media do - of oversexed, apathetic, young women going wild. So what's the disconnect? If young women are doing so well, why are so many people arguing that hooking up is ruining them?

The simple answer is that well-educated and socially engaged women don't make for sexy headlines and they certainly don't sell books. But there's also something more insidious going on here. Almost all of the books and reports written about hook-up culture are done by writers and researchers with ties to conservative or anti-feminist organizations - some are even outright funded by them.

Miriam Grossman, who wrote Unprotected, for example, is a senior fellow with the Clare Booth Luce Policy Institute - and organization that tries to shut down college performances of the award winning play The Vagina Monologues. The statistic that sexually active young women are more likely to be depressed and suicidal actually comes from a study done by The Heritage Foundation - a conservative think tank that's a strong proponent of abstinence only education, and that is against issues like same sex marriage and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (or CEDAW, a major international women's rights treaty in the UN.)

And around the same time these books and articles were being published, abstinence-only education was in pull effect and purity balls - events where young girls pledge their virginity to their fathers - were being held across the country. The connections keep on coming.

That's because the "virginity movement" realizes that talking about women's sexuality in this way is an incredibly effective tool to regress women's rights.

For example, emergency contraception was held up in the FDA for years for over-the-counter status simply because of fears that young women would go all slutty. It actually came to light that an FDA medical official wrote in an internal memo that over-the-counter status for emergency contraception could cause "extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B." Let's be clear, this was an FDA official holding up a safe contraceptive that because of the fear of teen sex cults.

So when we see stories about young women "going wild," let's make sure to think about where they're coming from - and what the agenda is. Especially because focusing on hyped-up problems that sell newspapers, titillate the imagination and line the pockets of conservative organizations make it that much easier to ignore actual problems young women are facing, issues that take a lot more than a moral scolding to fix.

If the same people who are working themselves into a panic over women's sexuality spent half as much time advocating on behalf of issues that young women really need help with we might actually be getting somewhere. But instead, we're stuck talking about what a shame it is that young women are having sex, when the truth is, it isn't a shame at all.